– a handful of buttons, a needle and thread, some scraps of material. At last the gifts had paid off, buying the two of them their places in the relative warmth and safety of the reception centre.
And so the next morning, instead of trudging along the snow-packed track to the factory, they walked a few hundred yards to the huddle of buildings beside the gates to the camp. As they went, Claire blew on her hands, trying to stop her fingers from freezing. ‘I wonder who’ll take over our jobs in the factory,’ she mused aloud.
Vivi began to speak, but the cold air caught in her lungs, making her whole body convulse as she coughed. When she found her voice again, she said, ‘Well, I hope whoever takes over my machine doesn’t discover that I set it to make the toes and heels of the socks thinner instead of reinforcing them. I reckon there’ll be quite a few German soldiers with very sore feet by now. That’s been my most recent contribution to the war effort!’ For a moment, her hazel eyes flashed with a little of their old spark, and Claire couldn’t help laughing. The sound was like music in the frozen air, a sound so unusual that it made the prisoners walking a few yards ahead of them turn and stare. In the nearest guard tower, the barrel of a machine gun swung in their direction and Claire quickly stifled her mouth with her hand.
Vivi coughed again, and her breath turned into little clouds above her head which froze into droplets of ice, weaving themselves into her halo of short, russet curls. A ray of low winter sunshine illuminated her for a moment and Claire was struck by how beautiful her friend looked in that moment, as out of place in the drab surroundings of the camp as a ruby nestling in a heap of rags.
Mireille could sense that the German grip on Paris had begun to weaken. There were fewer soldiers on leave, these days, sitting at the cafés and restaurants along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and more and more military convoys leaving the city, heading northwards.
Monsieur Leroux arrived at the apartment one evening in June, carrying a large box. He set it down on the table in the sitting room with a flourish. ‘Voilà! A present for you, Mireille.’ She opened the box to find a wireless radio set.
A year ago she might have felt a qualm of fear at having such a thing under her roof, but now it represented a small freedom.
Once he had plugged it in and positioned the aerial correctly, a voice filled the room. At first she could scarcely grasp what the announcer was saying.
‘What does he mean?’ she asked Monsieur Leroux. ‘What is this “Operation Overlord”?’
His eyes shone with a look of hope which had been absent for such a very long time. ‘The Allies have landed on the beaches of Normandy, Mireille. This is it. The big push! They are fighting on French soil.’
Every evening after that, she would hurry back upstairs from the sewing room once the working day was over and switch on the radio to listen to the latest news from the BBC and the Free French broadcaster, Radiodiffusion Nationale. The voices filled the room with bulletins announcing the latest advances as, town by town, the Allies clawed France back from German control. And as she listened, those same voices seemed to fill her heart with fresh hope. She began to let herself believe, again, that there would be an end to the war; that she would be able to see her family soon; that Claire and Vivi would come home; and that maybe – just maybe – out there somewhere the young Free French airman, whose name she whispered at night in the silence of her darkened room, was fighting his way back to free the city where she sat waiting, in limbo, for her life to begin again.
Slowly but surely a new tone of defiance crept into the voices coming through the radio, until, at last, the tide turned.
It was a hot August afternoon and Mademoiselle Vannier had sent the few remaining seamstresses home early. There was so little work these days and only one team remained, working on the increasingly sporadic orders that came in. More often than not, the salon downstairs remained closed, the blinds drawn over the plate glass windows embellished with the name Delavigne Couture.
Mireille flung open the windows of the